This week, Alexander Vindman testified with firsthand knowledge of the Ukraine call and the House voted to formalize the impeachment inquiry. Plus, who’s the person you should be keeping your eye on heading into next week?
Our panel of journalists take a deep dive into the biggest news stories of the week, including winners and losers in the teacher’s strike, and more elected officials busted by the feds.
The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia, a collective of independently owned and operated podcasts.
A note on shownotes. In a perfect world, you go into each episode of the Memory Palace knowing nothing about what's coming. It's pretentious, sure, but that's the intention. So, if you don't want any spoilers or anything, you can click play without reading ahead.
Anyway...
Music
Inside River, Pt. 1 by Akira Kosuemura. .
Sonata for Solo Cello 1: Dialogo by Ligeti, performed by Miklos Perenyi.
All the Land Ablaze by Laura Cannell
Frost Trees from Lalo Schiffren's score to The Fox.
And Finding the Flag from Georges Delarue's score to The Day of the Dolphin.
Most of us take the ability to speak fluently for granted, but for listener Breeda it has been a lifelong struggle. She has asked CrowdScience to investigate whether there is a cure for stuttering and, if not, what the best way to live with it is. Breeda is not alone, as stammering is a neurological condition that affects 70 million people worldwide.
The CrowdScience team head to Oslo in Norway to follow a group of young people who have signed up for a highly disciplined and potentially life-changing training course. The first milestone is to learn to say their name without a stutter. For many, this is a huge challenge that triggers years of distress and anxiety.
With hundreds of muscles and many parts of the brain being involved, speaking is one of the most complex tasks that humans perform. Scientists have discovered subtle differences in the insulation surrounding nerve cells, so-called myelin, between people who stutter and those who don’t. This irregularity may be the source of a tiny time delay in signals between crucial regions of the brain that need to work closely together to produce speech. In the future, it may be possible to stimulate certain brain areas to boost growth and connectivity.
Presenter: Gareth Barlow
Produced by Louisa Field for the BBC World Service
(Image: Illustration of humans speaking with quotation marks, credit: Getty Images)
Google buys Fitbit. Apple hits a new high on earnings. Facebook connects with advertisers. And Barbie gives Mattel a boost. Motley Fool analysts Andy Cross, Ron Gross, and Jason Moser discuss those stories and weigh in on the latest from Arista Networks, Avis Budget, Dine Brands Global, Etsy, Grubhub, Starbucks, Teladoc Health, Texas Roadhouse, and Wayfair. (To get 50% off our Stock Advisor service, go to http://RadarStocks.Fool.com.)
Get the money you need to run your small business. Go to Kabbage.com and use the code FOOL to get $100 credit on your first loan statement. Offer ends November 30, 2019. Must take a minimum $5000 loan to qualify. Credit lines subject to review and change. Individual requests for capital are separate installment loans issued by Celtic Bank, Member FDIC.
In the United States, some police jurisdictions didn’t send off DNA evidence from people who were raped for testing in a crime lab and for uploading into a national criminal database. Instead, the sets of evidence, known as rape kits, were sat on shelves and in warehouses.
It’s estimated that hundreds of thousands need processing. In this edition, Ruth Alexander explores how some jurisdictions are testing the kits now and using the data to catch criminals.
Producer: Darin Graham
Presenter: Ruth Alexander
(Untested sexual assault kits on warehouse shelves. Image: courtesy Joyful Heart Foundation)
Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech and Santa Fe Institute specializing in quantum mechanics, arrow of time, cosmology, and gravitation. He is the author of Something Deeply Hidden and several popular books and he is the host of a great podcast called Mindscape. This is the second time Sean has been on the podcast. You can watch the first time on YouTube or listen to the first time on its episode page. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts or support it on Patreon. Here’s the outline with timestamps for this episode (on some players you can click on the timestamp to jump to that point in the episode):
00:00 – Introduction
01:23 – Capacity of human mind to understand physics
10:49 – Perception vs reality
12:29 – Conservation of momentum
17:20 – Difference between math and physics
20:10 – Why is our world so compressable
22:53 – What would Newton think of quantum mechanics
25:44 – What is quantum mechanics?
27:54 – What is an atom?
30:34 – What is the wave function?
32:30 – What is quantum entanglement?
35:19 – What is Hilbert space?
37:32 – What is entropy?
39:31 – Infinity
42:43 – Many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics
1:01:13 – Quantum gravity and the emergence of spacetime
1:08:34 – Our branch of reality in many-worlds interpretation
1:10:40 – Time travel
1:12:54 – Arrow of time
1:16:18 – What is fundamental in physics
1:16:58 – Quantum computers
1:17:42 – Experimental validation of many-worlds and emergent spacetime
1:19:53 – Quantum mechanics and the human mind
1:21:51 – Mindscape podcast
Amanda Holmes reads Jaroslav Seifert’s poem, “November Rain.” Have a suggestion for a poem? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
On March 8th, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished during a routine flight from Kuala Lumpaur to Beijing. While public -- and, later, private -- entities from across the region searched for signs of the craft, no one was able to figure out what exactly happened. Join the guys as they delve into a mystery that remains largely unsolved three years later -- the disappearance of MH370, and why some people claim there's a conspiracy afoot.